Santa Cruz Alcohol Appreciation #5: Hard Cider

Here’s how it works: everybody brings a different kind of the specified alcohol, we make lots of food and then we do a blind taste test and take notes. To try to keep down on potential preconceived notions, one of us either covers all the bottles in numbered brown paper bags or we pour each one into an identical bottle labeled with a number. After all the ciders (or whichever item we are tasting) have been sampled, we reveal what each one was.

For hard cider, we ended up with a few specimens of an AA first: homemade booze.

Here’s what we had, along with some of my favorite “tasting notes” for each one. This round was interesting because we ended up with some ice ciders as well as regular hard ciders. Technically we probably shouldn’t have lumped them all together but we did. What was interesting to me is how almost everyone wrote down “Jolly Ranchers,” “green apple Jolly Ranchers” or “candy” for number 7. I don’t think we’ve seen that much consensus before.